Australian
Screen

Clip description

The burdens of office are affecting John Curtin’s (William McInnes) health. His daughter Elsie Junior (Asher Keddie) feels helpless in the face of his returning depression and confides as much to her mother, also Elsie (Noni Hazlehurst), while close friend Ben Chifley (Geoff Morrell) does his best to rally the always fractious Jack Beasley (Frank Gallacher) and Eddie Ward (Tony Rickards) in Curtin’s support.

Curator’s notes

Here we see a man in crisis, caught in a vortex of anxiety-induced insomnia that threatens to consume what is left of his physical energy and mental capacity. Portraying mental illness is always a challenge because it can so easily be overdone; setting it against a full moon is really tempting fate. However, Jessica Hobbs and her actors manage both very successfully in the first scene of this clip, with Asher Keddie’s vitally concerned Elsie providing an excellent foil for Curtin’s raging emotions, allowing William McInnes to play them to the hilt.

The moonlit effect is beautifully handled by DOP László Baranyai, who is rightly careful of the wild effect that the prosthetic eye, worn by McInnes to simulate Curtin’s own lazy left eye, produces in this kind of light.

Noni Hazlehurst is at her best in the following scene, when she allows the compassionate but deeply pragmatic Elsie Curtin to shine through the aura of sweet domesticity that prevails elsewhere in the film. The political pamphlets dressing the room are a rare reference to the fact that Elsie led a political life of her own at least as full, if not as dramatic, as her husband’s.

The final scene of the clip features Geoff Morrell (Ben Chifley) who puts in a solid performance worthy of study by aspiring actors. Chifley, Curtin’s close friend and colleague, was to become another iconic Labor prime minister, assuming office shortly after Curtin’s death. Both men were of humble origin with very little formal schooling and they shared the same passion for ‘bringing something better to the people, better standards of living, greater happiness to the mass of the people’, as articulated in Chifley’s famous ‘Light on the hill’ speech in 1949. Chifley however was a very different personality and Morrell conveys his hard-headed, deceptively avuncular style of politics very successfully in the relatively few opportunities he has to do so in the film.